Future Police

Seems that in the 1980’s a feller named Drexler wrote a book about molecular robots that might someday repair human tissue on a cell-by-cell basis, presumably even resurrecting the dead. A chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, another feller named Bill Joy, read this book and became convinced that these mechanical critters could, once created, reproduce uncontrollably. Something had to be done, Bill Joy said.

This is another area of progress, like genetically engineered foods, that needs scrutiny, monitoring, policy and education. What it doesn’t need is the near-Roswell hystrionics of unsubstantiated sensational-media mumbo-jumbo — particularly when fomented by industry leaders and technical writers otherwise regarded as “respectable”.